If you want to know how important the college application essay can be, consider this:

My daughter was applying to law schools, and the dean at Georgetown invited her to a group interview at Georgetown Law. The group of 12 attendees were to discuss real application scenarios to voice their opinions on whether an applicant should be accepted or not. Plagiarism was involved in two cases (they didn’t get an offer), but most interesting to me was the case of a student who had excellent numbers.

The applicant had stellar grades and a top LSAT score, but he wrote a poor personal statement. My daughter argued that a lawyer needs to be very attentive to the details of what she writes, and that if the applicant was careless with this personal statement, he might be careless as a lawyer.

The dean of Georgetown law agreed: The applicant with stellar grades and a top LSAT score was denied admission to GU Law because of a poor essay.